Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman’s important new book, “A Great Power of Attorney”: Understanding the Fiduciary Constitution, seeks to explain what the Constitution of the United States is. While that might appear to be a goal that could only be achieved with a massive tome (or perhaps several of them), the book runs about 200 pages and is focused narrowly on the question of what kind of document “We the People” ratified in 1788. The Constitution has been called a contract, a compact, a covenant, a charter, and (by one of the coauthors in a previous writing) a recipe—all of which…
Prosecuting with Dynamite
So here’s how this went down, supposedly: Mr. Yates, a commercial fisherman, tools around on his “Miss Katie” in the Gulf of Mexico. Along comes a vessel with government officials (state officials, but deputized by the feds to enforce federal fishing laws). The officials board Miss Katie and find suspicious red grouper: the fish look too small. They measure some of the fish and find that six dozen are below the legal size of 20 inches. They instruct Mr. Yates to keep the small fish in an ice box until docking, and depart. Mr. Yates instructs his crew to toss the offending fish overboard and to replace them with legal specimens.
He gets indicted and convicted (30 days in the slammer and three years supervised release)—under what law? 18 USC 2232(a) (destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure); and (drumroll!) the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SarbOx).
